Cripping Intersex

Intersex and/as/is/with disability. The political, discursive, and embodied connections between intersex and disability deserve nuanced attention if we are to strengthen intersex human rights claims and reflect the experiences of intersex people living with the disabling consequences of medical intervention.

Cripping Intersex examines three key themes: the medical management of people with intersex characteristics; the mainstream, academic, and medical fascination with sport sex-testing policies and procedures; and the eugenic implications of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a reproductive screening technology that can accompany in vitro fertilization. Celeste E. Orr investigates how intersex and interphobia intersect with disability and activism to propose a new field – crip intersex studies – and argues for a crip approach to intersex activism. In integrating feminist disability studies with intersex studies, they also provide tools to break down both the traditional sex dyad and the entrenched cultural mandate against intersex traits.

Cripping Intersex advances a critique of the ways in which attempts to exorcise intersex variations are a form of medical violence to offer a radical new understanding of intersex-with-disability. In the process, this necessary work pushes analyses of intersex histories, experience, and embodiment further than feminist or queer theory can do alone.